The members of his own clan are not the only kin whom a man is not allowed to marry. The Todas have a general term, püliol, for those relatives whose intermarriage is prohibited. The term is applied by a man not only to the women whom he may not marry, but also to the families in general into which he may not marry; thus a man may speak of other men as his püliol, meaning by this that he may not marry their sisters. This, however, is only a loose way of using the word, and, putting on one side this sense in which the word may be used, the following are the püliol of a man:—
(i.) The daughters of his father’s brothers, whom he would call akka or enda, according to age.
(ii.) The daughters of his mother’s sisters, also akka or enda.
(iii.) The sisters of his father and conversely the daughters of his sisters, i.e., his mumi and his mankugh.
(iv.) The daughters of the sisters of his father’s father, i.e., of the sisters of his pian.
The relatives under the first head will be members of the same clan as the man, and the prohibition of marriage between püliol under this head may be regarded as a restriction dependent on either clanship or kinship.
There seemed to be no doubt, however, that in connexion with marriage, a man always thought of these relatives as püliol, a term which denotes certain kin, to whatever clan they may belong. So far as I could ascertain, if a man thought of a given woman, he thought of her as one, or not one, of his püliol, and it seemed to me in several cases as if it came almost as a new idea to some of the Todas that his püliol included all the people of his own clan.
If I am right in this, it means that it is the bond of blood-kinship [[510]]which a Toda has chiefly in his mind when he considers whether he may or may not marry a given woman. He has not two kinds of prohibited affinity, one depending on clan relations, and another on relations of blood-kinship, but he has only one kind of prohibited affinity, to which he gives the general term püliol, including certain kin through the father and certain kin through the mother, and there is no evidence that he considers the bond of kinship in one case as different from the other as regards restriction on marriage.
The fact that the Toda includes all those kin whom he may not marry under one general term, and that the kin in question include members both of his own and other clans, goes to show that the Todas recognise the blood-kinship as the restrictive agency rather than the bond produced by membership of the same clan.
The analysis of the genealogical record has shown that these restrictions on marriage are enforced. I have already stated that the genealogies show no single case in which marriage has occurred between members of the same clan, i.e., between püliol who come under the first head in the list given above.